Children go through a stage authorities call individuation. We have an instinct that tells us that we should be free to connect with new things as well as familiar things. Well, for myself, that individuation stage was my entire early childhood. What I intuited, even then, was that as strange or “alien” as the world around me seemed, I understood that there needed to be a sense to it, an order to it. This is probably why I show my strange preoccupations, maybe to make up for a missing sense of human connection? Missing or compromised.

That would be a cultural thing, not all peoples have that angst. From everything I have learned, for most people, even of the mainland Americas, a certain preoccupation with other people, with social connections and socialized meaning, dominates much if not most of their attention.

All of ‘modern, industrialized’ society, yes.

Of that world yes. Their disconnect is profound and troubling to many in that group.

This is the mirror image of the child’s instinctive empathy. Instinctively, children have a sense of integrity, of what biologists call homoeostasis, that everything is or can be made all right.

The age of reason was the fall of empathy? And end of innocence? Yes.

Whew, we [Native Hawaiian] were spared and therefore never became “reasonable.” Yes, that is a blessing. I question if one can be both reasonable and sane. Our empathy is just our natural sense of our own well being, and by extension of the well being of those others around us.

It is used against us, though. We are called “unreasonable, unteachable.” We are among the hopeless. You would be perhaps one of the last vestiges of hope on our planet. When we become reasonable, when we have been “educated” in the traditional way, well, can this be done and still leave our empathy intact?

When I went to school I was automatically placed in the group of the “unreasonable and uneducable.” The lowest expectations group, therefore the most ignored. Because I am Hawaiian, they presumed my ignorance etc. Profiling.

They are now finding that the old teaching methods fail. Even from a strictly practical level they aren’t meeting the needs of the contemporary world and don’t make maximum use of individuals native intelligence and talents. They are even moving away from a generalized idea of intelligence.

It is very dangerous, too. Cheating the young like that. To educate in the old way? Oh, indeed. It has lead to America’s current state of poverty. Part of the reason Japan’s education system outstrips the Americas is something that they still aren’t really talking about. For the Japanese, “schools” and discipline has been a long standing part of their culture, even before anything like modern academia was any concern.

Public education was started as a place to put working class children while parents worked. Public education had a mandate to create compliant minds, not thinking minds.

Japan’s approach is similar to our “halau” schools Hawaiian teaching strategy. Listen, look, say nothing for a long time, stay at a subject until done. A kind of focusing, ability to know a song and or a hula at first hearing, total memorization. Is their judgement of the student or assumption that the student can fail?

No, no fail, just go until you got it, and a class would wait until all were on the same page. That is where innocence is either kept or lost, the idea of failure. Does a toddler show any worry about whether they can meet their developmental goals?

This is why the game structure of ‘levelling’ has been talked about for schooling. No failure, only advancement from where you are.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~